Eduardo Lourenço faces The Book of Disquiet

Abstract

In 1982, the first exhaustive edition of texts attributable to The Book of Disquiet had a decisive impact on studies of Fernando Pessoa's work. This was because these texts not only offered new ways of understanding heteronymy, but also called into question the myth of its genesis, according to which the emergence of Caeiro, Reis and Campos in 1914 corresponded to an instant of rupture in Pessoa’s creative process. Eduardo Lourenço was especially sensitive to such paradigm shifts, as witnessed by the essays he compiled in Fernando, King of our Bavaria (1986), most of which were written after the publication of that “kind of non-book or impossible book”. In one of them, inspired by the recently published work, the essayist conceives of “classical heteronymy” as a camouflage for the “original heteronymism” that presided over Pessoa’s creation from an early age. Proposing to reflect on the presumed change of perspective brought about by The Book of Disquiet in the way Lourenço thinks about Pessoa and the author’s critical tradition, this article suggests that the hypotheses put forward by the essayist from then on were latent in earlier texts, including Pessoa Revisited (1973). In this way, other essays gathered in the two volumes of Pessoa studies in the Complete Works of Eduardo Lourenço, sponsored by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, are also brought together, which provide an apprehension of the main thrusts of his essays on Fernando Pessoa.